As in his previous novels, Vasquez explores the overlaps of
personal and national history. “The Informers,” for instance,
traced the aftershocks of one man’s betrayal during Colombia’s
blacklisting of Germans in the 1940s.

The new novel looks at the ripple effects of the country’s
illicit-drug trade. The hippo, an escapee from the former
private zoo of drug czar Pablo Escobar, appears in news stories
in 2009. It reminds Bogota lawyer Antonio Yammara of being shot
accidentally in 1996 when an unknown gunman killed the man he
was standing next to, an acquaintance he had only recently met.

This is a former drug pilot named Ricardo Laverde who
started flying marijuana in the early 1970s before landing in
prison for 19 years. His death and Antonio’s injury affected the
lawyer’s marriage as he brooded over his bad luck and then
sought to know more about Ricardo.

He connected with the pilot’s daughter, gaining access to a
family history that begins with a young woman from the U.S.,
Elaine Fritts, who arrived in Bogota to work for the Peace Corps
in 1969. She stayed with the Laverde family and fell in love
with Ricardo.

Perverted Ideal

Their marriage brought him into contact with Peace Corps
workers who perverted John F. Kennedy’s ideal of volunteerism by
teaching the local farmers marijuana husbandry: “where to plant
so the mountains protect the plants, what fertilizer to use, how
to tell the male plants from the females.” Later other
volunteers “taught the campesinos to process the coca paste.”

Ricardo was one of the pilots who flew the pot harvests to
the U.S. Soon he and Elaine had a new home with a swimming pool.

But Uncle Sam giveth and Uncle Sam taketh away. Richard
Nixon proclaimed a War on Drugs in 1971, Ricardo was busted and
Elaine for years concealed her husband’s true life from their
daughter, Maya.

Meanwhile, Escobar’s empire was growing, and the violence
that accompanies the drug business scarred a generation of
Colombians. They shared milestones like the 1984 assassination
of a justice minister, leading to the Colombian equivalent of a
question familiar to Kennedy-era Americans: “Where were you
when they killed Lara Bonilla?”

Black Box

Running through the book are references to and passages
from an audiotape copy of the black-box chatter between two
pilots on a commercial flight carrying Elaine to a Christmas
1995 reunion with Ricardo.

The dialogue, bluntly alluded to in the novel’s title,
makes a chilling transition from the mundane to the mortal. As
do the novel’s interlocking narratives, each character moving
from unexceptional lives to those unavoidable scars.

I found the Conradian opening device, which creates a 10-year distance from the main events, a bit contrived (and it
leaves an untidy hole at the book’s end). Still, Vasquez is a
resourceful storyteller. Scenes and dialogue shine with well-chosen details. His theme echoes compellingly through family
parallels, ill-fated flights and even a recurring hippo motif.
He shrugs off the long shadow of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with a
gritty realism that has its own persuasive magic.

“The Sound of Things Falling” is published by Riverhead
(270 pages, $26.95). To order this book in North America, click
here.

(Jeffrey Burke is an editor with Muse, the arts and leisure
section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

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